Casino's have historicall done everything in their power to put a stop to skill in blackjack. They use shufflers, they change the rules and create pseudo-blackjack variations with single decks and now Bally are going one step further with a management system called 'Mindplay'

Blackjack scares casinos - its the only casino game in which skill can actually make a difference - and the players they're most scared of are the card-counters - even the basic card counting techniques take not of how many high and low cards come out of the shoe.

Mindplay attempts to put a stop to it by analysing each card in realtime using a scanner

after the cards are shuffled and before they are loaded into the dealer's shoe, they are very briefly placed in an indented bay where they are instantly scanned into a database.

Yet another optical reader, implanted underneath the dealer's chip tray, reads and calculates every chip on the table

All this info is fed in real-time through a computer and then displayed on a monitor, ostensibly sitting on the desk of a blackjack pit supervisor.

Whoever sits in front of the monitor knows everything.. in real time... the precise average bet of each player, the relative profitability of each table, how fast or slow the dealer's pace is, whether the dealer is a "game builder" who attracts more players or a "killer" who chases them away, what precise percentage of advantage or disadvantage each player is performing at and, of course, how much, down to the penny, each one has won or lost.

It all sounds like the stifling for the gambler and a huge bunch of sour grapes from the casino operators. Casinos don't like winners - we all know that. This feels more like gambling genocide. They may as well get rid of blackjack tables completely from all casinos and be done with it.

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